flowers?

I think I’m sort of digging the daisy theme (which, credit where its due, I got from here). The red theme had problems with fonts showing up too small in some browsers, and the blue one was pretty, but it just didn’t grab me as much as this one. I don’t know, is it too girly?

boundaries

There is something that is driving me absolutely crazy – ok, actually it’s someone – and I am dying to write an angry ranting post about it, but unfortunately, it falls under my “don’t blog about work” policy, so I have to keep my mouth shut. But damn, I’m going nuts over here. I feel bad because Dave has to endure listening to me complain about this person a lot when we’re at home, because he’s my only outlet for venting about him/her. (See? I’m not even telling you what gender this person is. It’s all very vague and mysterious. Nothing worth firing me over.) It would be so much easier if I could write about it here, and this person is allegedly going to be leaving at some point in the near future, so maybe I can complain about him/her after the fact. For now, I just have to bang my head repeatedly on my desk and silently weep. Which I guess is working ok for me so far.

Happy news: tonight Dave and I are going to meet up with our wedding photographer to get all of the formal pictures from our wedding. She said that she has some really great black and white shots, so I’m excited to see those. I’ll try to get them scanned in as soon as possible, but it’ll probably be the weekend before I’ll have a chance to get it done.

skin update

Warning: Girly talk about skin care and cosmetics ahead.
The antibiotic from my dermatologist appears to be working. I hardly have any new pimples, and the ones that I do have are little and near the hairline on my forehead, which is where I usually get them. But then last weekend, I started to notice that I was getting some dry skin around my eyes. Which presented a problem, since I don’t own any type of moisturizer that one would use on one’s face. Don’t yell at me for this, I know it’s a major girl no-no, but come on. Why does an already oily-faced person need more moisture? I just never saw the point, so I never used the stuff. To be honest, I tried using it a few times in high school and college (I don’t remember the brands I tried, I’m pretty sure it was usually cheap drug store stuff), but it always made me break out more, so I dropped it. I’ve just never seen the point.

But then, I got the dry eye thing, and it hurt, and it was ugly, and I didn’t like it. I heard really good things about Clarins, and how it doesn’t cause breakouts like other (cheaper) cosmetics do, so I decided to check them out. I made Dave come with me because I am totally intimidated by department store cosmetics saleswomen. I can’t explain it, but they scare the shit out of me. It could be the lab coats. And maybe it was because my husband was with me, or maybe I just lucked out and got an unusually nice saleslady, but she didn’t try to tell me that I was a horrible person for not using moisturizer every day since I was 13 years old, and she didn’t try to push an entire line of crap on me. That last part was almost definitely because of Dave, who was looking bored and fidgety the whole time, exactly as I had instructed him ahead of time to do because I wanted to get the hell out of there fast. The nice saleslady did lose points by telling me that after my face gets used to their sensitive skin formula, I might want to move on to the anti-aging products (bitch), but she made up for it by giving Dave some free samples from their men’s line.

So I bought a very nice eye balm, which I have now used for 3 days and oh, how I love it. No more dry skin around my eyes, and it seems like the shadows under my eyes are fading too. Awesome. I also got a day cream for sensitive skin, which… ok, now I understand why you’re supposed to put on moisturizer under your make-up. Yes, it makes everything go on smoother. And it seems like I’m using less make-up because it’s easier to make it all look even. Why didn’t my mother tell me that when I was in junior high? All this time, I had no idea.

Now, if it turns out that even this Clarins stuff makes me break out after I have experienced the bliss that is smooth make-up application, I am going to be one unhappy camper. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

not much to say

It’s strange how I’ll often think of something – a story, anecdote, whatever – that would make a good blog entry, and I think to myself that I’ll write it down the next day. Then, the next day, something like this happens, and all the clever funny stuff just flies right out of my head. Or at the very least, it seems totally irrelevant now. The first thing I did when I heard about the London attacks this morning was call Dave to check to see if he knows people there. He does, but he’s pretty sure none of them work downtown, so all of his friends and relatives should be safe. Thank God for that, but still. It’s absolutely horrible, I can’t imagine what it’s like over there right now.

A co-worker of mine mentioned that sometime in the next week or two, I should check to see if airline prices plummet, since we were going to fly through Heathrow for our honeymoon this fall. Um, yeah. Because when dozens of people die horribly, the first thing I think about is how I can angle it into a way to save myself a couple of hundred bucks on a plane ticket. God.

In other news that somewhat relates to current events, I’ve been sort of moody for the past few days. Nothing major, just typical girl stuff. But when I told Dave that Tropical Storm Cindy had hit, his response was along the lines of, “I’ll say it has.” Ha.

how to avoid getting hauled off to the pokey

This past weekend was pretty low-key. Since Dave and I have been doing more than our fair share of home improvements over the past few weeks, we decided that this holiday weekend would be literally that, a holiday. We really didn’t do much of anything, we watched a lot of “Sopranos” on DVD (I now have Dave hooked), played a lot of video games, and took a lot of naps. It was lovely.

Friday night, however, we went to a Canada Day party at the home of one of Dave’s co-workers and his wife. Obviously, they’re Canadian, but we like them anyway. (That’s a joke! I love Canadians! Don’t send me hate mail!) I had a really good time. I had a headache so I volunteered to be our designated driver, which was fun for me because I hardly ever see Dave get drunk. On the rare occasions that he does have a few too many, you can almost guarantee that I’ve had twice as much, so I tend not to notice his drunkenness when I myself am bombed out of my skull. But on the night when all I was drinking was water, it was pretty obvious how much he had imbibed, and it was damn funny. They started playing some sort of drinking game that involves cards, and I think everyone was pretty much completely hammered after that. Good times.

The odd thing about the evening was that well over half of the people in attendance (including me) had lived in Memphis at some point. How they all ended up at a Canada Day party in the Pacific Northwest is beyond me. One of the women there even graduated from the University of Memphis at the same time as me – she majored in a completely different area, so I didn’t know her, but that was still a very odd coincidence. Greatest line of the night, which only my fellow southerners will understand:

Drunk southern guy (talking about the drinking game they were playing): “How did I lose?? I have all kings and aces!”
Slightly-less-drunk southern girl: “Because you’re not in Tunica, jackass!”

On the way home, I got pulled over for running a red light. I was really tired so I admit that I might not have been at my most attentive, but I’m still not sure if I believe that the light was really red or if the cop just wanted to mess with me. But I managed to get off with a warning, thanks to some ever-so-useful tips that I got in college from my friend Becky. She once got pulled over when I was with her – we were 21 at the time and had both been drinking – and the cop let us go without even asking us if we were drunk. These are the tips she gave me on how to avoid tickets, which I have never forgotten, and which I shall now share with you:

1. Be polite. Always say “sir” or “ma’am.”

2. Turn the engine and the radio off as soon as you pull over.

3. Have your window rolled down and your license out by the time the cop gets to the window.

4. Don’t lie and act like you don’t know what you did, just apologize. Or in my case, I genuinely didn’t know what I had done, but when he told me, I told him that if he said that I ran the red light, then I must have, and I was very sorry.

That’s it, really. He looked at my license, asked me if I was heading home to Duvall. I said “yes, sir,” and he told me to be careful because there were a lot of drunks on the road. (I suppose that’s true anytime on a Friday night after midnight, but particularly so on holiday weekends.) I told him that was the reason why I was driving, because my husband had had a few drinks earlier, and I gestured over at Dave in the passenger seat. He thanked me for doing my part (!) and told me to drive safely. The end. Politeness works, folks. Say thank you to Becky the next time this works and you successfully get out of a ticket.